The wildly ambitious future of the job search

For years, businesses across America have groused that they can’t find enough qualified workers, while others have questioned whether the “skills gap” is a myth.

Amid this tired debate, it’s easy to miss the fact that many of the smartest people trying to shape the working world have moved on. They have begun to view the problem as an information gap between companies looking for capable workers and individuals struggling to land a decent job.

Driving this shift is the belief that both workers and companies stand to benefit if it’s easier for them to identify each other—and if they’re also on the same page in terms of the skills and training required to fill particular positions.

“The idea is to make all of this simpler, less expensive, and more automatic” for the employer and the employee, says Byron Auguste, co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a new nonprofit aimed at “rewiring the U.S. labor market.”

This concept lies at the heart of TechHire, a public-private initiative that President Obama announced last week to help companies place people—many of them invisible to recruiters—in high-paying IT fields such as cybersecurity, network administration, coding, project management, and data analytics.

“If we can get the architecture right, I think we can make a lot of headway in getting employers to hire skilled people they’d otherwise overlook,” says Auguste, who until recently served in the White House as deputy director of the National Economic Council and had a lead role in designing TechHire.

Building platforms to connect job seekers with openings is hardly new, of course. U.S. newspapers have been running “help wanted” ads for more than two centuries. Monster.com has been around for 16 years, LinkedIn for 12.

What’s happening now is that new ingredients are being steadily added to the job-matching mix, promising to produce a more efficient and effective marketplace. Hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital are pouring into the space.

In the case of TechHire, which is launching in 21 regions, the objective is to create an ecosystem—populated by organizations such as Code To Work, the Flatiron School, LaunchCode, and others—to help employers articulate the specific skills that their workers must possess; bring job candidates quickly up to speed on the right stuff, often by having them participate in “coding boot camps” and other nontraditional educational offerings; and then put the two sides together.

TechHire faces significant hurdles. Some of the entities involved with the effort are small, having trained and placed just a few hundred workers so far, and there’s no guarantee that they can get to a large scale. Meanwhile, to take advantage of the network as an individual, you need to plug in, and more than 20% of American households lack regular Internet access. Financing high-potential, low-income talent is also a challenge. Even with the Obama administration pledging $100 million to help “people with barriers” receive training, the program is likely to remain out of reach for most of the nation’s poor; even the boot camps that TechHire is touting can cost $10,000 or more.

Still, there is palpable excitement at the prospect of a more transparent and fluid job market. Google’s Vint Cerf, widely considered one of the “fathers of the Internet,” envisions a massive databank that showcases people’s unique strengths, allowing employers to pull in just the right folks to tackle any task. “Instead of matching people to jobs, you match jobs to people,” says Cerf, who is active in the i4j (or Innovation for Jobs) community. Its goal: “disrupting unemployment.”

To some degree, what Cerf is calling for is already happening. ClearFit, for example, lets companies analyze their best performers and then search out applicants that have similar qualities. On ClearFit, employers are not only sent someone’s job history; they also receive the results of an online assessment that provides an instant sense of a person’s drive, capacity to withstand stress, tolerance for risk, preference for structure, interest in others, and 15 other characteristics.

“This takes you beyond the resume,” says ClearFit founder Ben Baldwin, “and gets to personality, motivation, and cultural fit”—giving the worker and the employer a better chance of having a successful relationship. ClearFit’s clients include small businesses, such as restaurants and car dealers, as well as Fortune 500 companies.

LinkedIn wants to take an even more ambitious step. The professional networking site, whose membership includes roughly 350 million of the world’s 780 million professionals and students, is trying to develop an “economic graph” that would digitally profile every one of the 3 billion-plus workers around the globe—whether they’re investment bankers in Manhattan or ditch diggers in the Sahara.

The economic graph would also feature every company on the planet—all 70 million or so of them—and a digital representation of every job available at these enterprises. It would detail the skills required to obtain open jobs at these companies and highlight educational institutions teaching those relevant skills.

“The dream, the vision, is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce,” Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO, recently told a group of executives convened by the Aspen Institute. An instrument like this, he added, has “never been imagined before, let alone executed on.”

Some are sure to dismiss the economic graph as pie in the sky. But there’s already plenty happening on the ground to suggest that technology won’t just kill jobs; it will enable people to secure them, too.

Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. The author or editor of five books, he is currently writing a narrative history of how the social contract between employer and employee in America has changed since the end of World War II.

In business, why kindness actually pays off

Just a few years ago, how a boss treated her team was not widely visible. Today, with online social networks, we can reference check others quickly and with great fidelity, making one seemingly obvious practice in business all the more important: generosity.

Those who ‘gift small goods,’ as I call offering help in even the most minor ways, strengthen relationships that, in turn, make them more effective. In a world where nobody seems to have time for anything, even modest ‘goods’ are meaningful.

“It’s not as if others will lie across the railroad tracks for you,” LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman explained, “but they will think about how things could be useful for you.” Hoffman described the importance of gifting small goods as we talked about what makes entrepreneurs effective at a Palo Alto café. (He is one of 200 leading entrepreneurs I interviewed for my new book, The Creator’s Code, to discover the true commonalities that underlie entrepreneurial success.) A willingness to pitch in with energetic assistance makes the giver the kind of person that others want to work with.

Simply, generosity is contagious. “When people benefit from cooperation, they don’t go back to being their old selfish selves,” says James Fowler, professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego. In a 2010 study he conducted with Nicholas Christakis, recipients of generosity were much more likely to be generous in future exchanges, and so were those who benefitted from that person’s giving. When one person gave a dollar to a stranger in the experiment, the effect rippled into subsequent interactions. That small gift stimulated three times as much in additional generosity down the line.

Needless to say, the opposite is also true. Those who act selfishly get cut off. In a 2011 study led by David Rand, then a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Department of Psychology and a lecturer in human evolutionary biology, nearly 800 online participants played a simple game in groups of between 20 and 30 participants. The volunteers were given the option to share a number of points with other players in a game or hold the points strictly for themselves. As expected, players who acted generously gained allies. “Defectors who didn’t collaborate were quickly shunned,” Rand explained when we met at Harvard. “What it boils down to is that you’d better be a nice guy, or else you’re going to get cut off.”

In my own research, I was struck by how consistently the founders of companies as diverse as Chipotle, Airbnb, and Under Armour looked for small ways to boost others. They made introductions, offered feedback, helped shape proposals, and opened doors. It was one of the six skills that emerged from my interviews with 200 top entrepreneurs. For example, Spanx founder Sara Blakely gives other female founders a “leg-up” by featuring their fledgling products in Spanx catalogs that reach one million people.

Gifting small goods can be done in small increments so it doesn’t consume all of your time. Biotechnology pioneer Bob Langer is known in scientific, business, and academic circles for his generosity with his time and attention. But his meetings are scheduled in strict 15-minute increments and his emails to scientists, investors, and students are often three sentences or less.

What’s to be learned from this? In the recent past, the ‘nice guy’ who did ‘the right thing’ by supporting colleagues won moral kudos and not much more. In the new technologically enhanced world of work, ‘nice guys’ really can finish first. They gain bottom line respect, results and revenue.

Amy Wilkinson is a strategic adviser, entrepreneur and lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is author of The Creator’s Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs.

Virgin Founder Richard Branson: Why you should listen more than you talk

In this series, professionals share their words of wisdom that made all the difference in their lives.

When I grew up our house was always a hive of activity, with Mum dreaming up new entrepreneurial schemes left, right and centre, and me and my sisters running wild. You were as likely to find me helping Mum with a new project as outside climbing a tree. Amidst all the fun and chaos, Dad was always a supportive, calming influence on us all. He wasn’t quiet, but he was not often as talkative as the rest of us. It made for a wonderful balance, and we always knew we could rely on him no matter what.

Within this discreet support lay one of his best and most simple pieces of advice for me: listen more than you talk. Nobody learned anything by hearing themselves speak. Wherever I go, I try to spend as much time as possible listening to the people I meet.

By this point, Maury Hanigan is used to winning pitch competitions. So far, she’s entered three and swept them all.

Her most recent victory was at Pitch Night NYC‘s inaugural competition, held in midtown Manhattan. From a field of 13 contenders, most who fit the tech startup stereotype, i.e. 20-something males in jeans and t-shirts, Hanigan stood out. Not just aesthetically — although blonde, middle-aged and dressed in business professional attire, she certainly did — but also for the poise and polish of her pitch.

While other founders floundered, wasting precious seconds of the strictly enforced two-minute time frame with unnecessary details, Hanigan’s focus never wavered. When it was her turn to get up in front of the judges, she concisely outlined what her startup, Match Click, does (“Match-Click solves the problem of employers trying to recruit passive candidates”), the need it fills (“companies want to poach the superstars from their competitors, but when they do reach out, only 5 percent of candidates respond”) and the traction it’s already generating (“we’re being used by Ernst & Young, L’Oreal, Cisco, Citrix and a bunch of other companies”).

A couple of weeks after her Pitch Night victory, Hanigan is at the start of what will be a busy day. It’s 9:30 a.m., and she’s already had a meeting with a prospective client. Later, she’ll head into the Match-Click offices, which are located in midtown. In a t-shirt, pink scarf and jeans, she’s dressed more casually that she was at Pitch Night and is palpably energized. After a long career spent helping companies with their recruitment strategies – including a 20-year stint running a talent management firm — she finds that entrepreneurship suites her. “It’s about people taking charge of their own lives — you don’t find a lot of complaining and whining.”

While many of her competitors at Pitch Night were recent college graduates, Hanigan believes her lengthy career experience gives her an edge. “I know employment law,” she says matter-of-factly. “That’s very important if you are going to start a business in this space, especially when you are talking about big companies.”

It also helps that she understands the recruiting process from both sides of the equation. Decades spent consulting companies on their recruitment strategies taught her what employers want, but she also has a solid grasp on the psyche of a job candidate, joking that “when you are in recruiting, everybody’s son’s nephew shows up on your doorstep asking you for advice and if you can read his resume.”

Unfortunately, a platform that delivers what both these employers and candidates wanted? That didn’t really exist. While the rest of the Internet had evolved into a visual platform, recruitment techniques were inexplicably stuck in the 1990s. “I looked at the available options and understood that for employers, there was no way for them to tell their stories,” she says. “And that’s what recruiting is. But you can’t do it with inaccessible text.”

So one day, in December of 2013, she literally sat down with a blank piece of paper and began designing a recruiting platform from scratch, guided only by the information she knew candidates wanted, and the information she knew employers needed. What, she wondered, would that look like?

Enter Match-Click.

Launched in June of last year, Hanigan’s startup is a mobile and video-friendly recruiting platform. Each job posting includes three short videos, one from the position’s hiring manager, along with two spots from colleagues who are able to briefly outline, in tangible and relatable terms, the top reasons to apply. There’s also a more traditional job description (because “legal departments aren’t going away”) but the posting is tailor-made to be shareable and engaging.

During the conception stages, Hanigan ran the platform by various Fortune 500 companies and made tweaks based on their feedback, especially from their legal departments. From the start, the focus has been to help businesses easily create job postings that, along with providing technical information (location, salary, responsibilities etc.), gives potential employees a real sense of what the work environment is actually like. “From the videos, it makes it easier to judge,” Hanigan says. “Is it formal or informal? How frantic is it? What’s the culture like?” The postings are designed to be shared, and “go viral.” (Not viral in the billions-of-hits style of Alex from Target, Hanigan stipulates, but “viral within a talent community.”)

Today, Match-Click is working with a handful of global companies, including L’Oreal and Ernst & Young, as well as a few smaller organizations. The service is intended to fill entry-level to mid-level professional positions, with salaries ranging from $75,000 to $150,000. “We’re never going to replace the C-Suite, and I don’t think people will look for hourly workers using Match-Click,” Hanigan says.

During our meeting, Hanigan pulls up a Match-Click position created by Morgans Hotel Group for a line cook at Isola at the Mandrian Hotel in Soho. While a typical job description can be found on the page, it’s the videos that stand out, including one from the position’s hiring manager, in this case executive chef Victor LaPlaca. “Why is Isola a great job? Not only is it a job but it is a career building move for you,” he says in the video, as plates and glassware clink in the background. “You learn to do a lot of things that you may not normally do, from butchering pigs to making mozzarella to making your own pasta.”

At 30 seconds, the video is slightly longer than Match-Click’s recommended length, but Hanigan feels it’s a great example of what the platform does best: giving candidates a window into what a position actually looks and feels like. “If you’re a line cook, the idea that you are able to slaughter your own pig…What!” she says excitedly. “In the middle of Manhattan?!”

Eventually, Hanigan wants to see Match-Click evolve into a place where candidates go to search for positions, but for now the startup is solely focused on creating job postings for employers. (A single position on the platform costs $249; The price goes down to $199 per position for 10 positions, and $149 per position for 100.)

Like most early-stage startups, Match-Click faces an uphill battle. There are a few minor kinks on the platform– the line-cook position, for example, fails to state the name or address of the restaurant. But that can easily be fixed; the real concern is the possibility that a big, established and tech-savvy recruiting site (OK, LinkedIn LNKD) will take Match-Click’s video feature and make it available for postings on its platform. Such a fear, Hanigan says, misses Match-Click’s real strength: Its ease of use. “We’ve done what Apple did, and make the user face so simple that you don’t appreciate the complexity behind it.” The company has a patent pending on its content management system.

Hanigan raised an initial round of $100,000 from family and friends, and is in the midst of raising an additional $1.2 million in a seed round. In light of her three pitch competition victories, “the fact that I’m still working so hard to close this round of funding makes it very frustrating,” she says, shaking her head. “I clearly have a something that, in two minutes, is identifiable as a viable business – it meets a real need, has a real revenue model, and has traction based on the Fortune 500 clients we have.”

When investors present her with a laundry list of criteria they say they want, she meets them all. “Having founded, built and run a multimillion-dollar business for 20 years, I’m an experienced entrepreneur; I have deep industry experience, I have traction, we’ve applied for a patent for our content management system,” she says, ticking off each item. And while some investors have shown interest, she admits it can be difficult. “As I like to say, I’m still dancing for my dinner.”

This is not your grandmother’s marketing world. There are more marketing methods than ever before. But there’s a major caveat to all this marketing commotion. So many of these marketing “hacks” and bold new moves could do the opposite of grow your business.

They could ruin your business.

Risky new moves put your painstakingly built business at the mercy of the elements. One wrong move, and you’re history. There’s also the cost risk, which is the biggest risk in my opinion. You must protect your marketing dollar and avoid squandering your pennies into dead-end methods.

So, how do you engage the potentially awesome techniques of modern marketing, but avoid the attendant risks? Here are a few important things that you’ll want to keep in mind.

Keep your goals front and center.

Every good business has goals — and not just the pie-in-the-sky goals of “get bigger” or “make more money.” The goals of worthy businesses are specific, measurable, attainable and timely. They also change often: Yearly, quarterly and strategically.

Goals keep a business on track. When the marketing winds change, and they will, all you need to do is look at your goals and ask, “Is this going to fulfill our goals right now, or will this simply distract us?”

Answer the question. Sometimes, you may need to go with your gut. Sometimes you may want to take a risk. But most of the time, you can play it safe. Your goals are important. Don’t sacrifice them.

It just doesn’t cost as much. That’s why it’s the method of choice for many startups. I suggest thinking about growth hacking in a simple way.

First ask, “How much does it cost?”

If it’s expensive, then avoid it, postpone it or make sure there is zero risk.

If it’s free or costs very little, then give it a try.

Here’s why I propose this simple method. Most often, the big-dollar marketing methods are not as effective for small businesses, businesses targeting millennials or businesses looking to grow in a postmodern market. The free or low-cost methods have their risk, too. The risks, at least from a financial standpoint, aren’t quite as risky.

Hire someone who is budget-conscious and ruthless.

Unless you’re totally solo in this entrepreneur thing then one of the most important people you can hire is a marketing professional.

Make sure you’re hiring for the right reasons. Whomever you hire must have a proven track record of growing businesses. But, equally important, look for these two qualities:

Budget-consciousness

Ruthlessness

The marketing leader must know that budget is important. This will force him or her to make moves that are strategic instead of haphazard. Ruthlessness doesn’t describe the personality as much as it does the determination to achieve goals.

When hiring a marketing professional, you can expect to pay him or her $40,000 to $65,000 per year, on average.

Make your customers your evangelists.

You can’t fail with turning your customers into evangelists. They will be more successful at marketing than you can ever dream of being, simply because they’re customers.

As you brainstorm growth hacking methods, don’t forget about this largely untapped source of marketing potential. As long as they are satisfied, your customers want to be evangelists. All it takes is a little nudge from you, and a few instructions on how to do it.

Evangelism takes many shapes and forms. Sometimes, it’s incentivized by compensating your customers with a free premium version of your product or service. But the most effective techniques happen spontaneously and eagerly. In which, if you make a great product, treat your customers right, and then give them a nudge, they’ll gladly evangelize your company for free.

Publish content.

Content marketing is one of the most effective means of growing a business in the modern information age.

Content marketing isn’t some novel technique anymore. Companies that don’t do content marketing are in the minority. In order to succeed at it, you have to work harder, publish better and get more strategic.

I often see companies bail on content marketing because, as they claim, it’s “not working.” Usually, the reason is because they haven’t been doing it long enough. Content marketing isn’t a quick dash. It’s a marathon marketing method.

There are ways to enhance the power of content marketing. The first way is by building an email list and harnessing the power of email marketing to enhance your published content.The second way is to use a variety of content forms. Hint: It can be more than a blog. Content marketing can include videos, forums, infographics, LinkedIn publishing, white papers, ebooks, etc.

Promote your personal brand.

The final, and perhaps most important method of keeping an opening marketing mind while protecting your business, is to promote your personal brand.

Businesses may fail, but you as an individual are going to stick around. You’re going to start more businesses. You’re going to do more stuff.

Your brand is more important than you realize. While you’re throwing your time and energy into the effort of building a new business, don’t neglect your personal brand. You can use your personal brand to grow your business, and your new business can help to grow your personal brand.

If your business fails, you’ll have your personal brand to fall back on.

Conclusion

Marketing is a fun and risky ride. There’s nothing quite like finding that sweet spot that starts delivering a steady torrent of visitors.

It can take you a while to find it or to build it. In the meantime, keep testing, keep exploring, but keep protecting your business. Keep an open mind, but protect what truly matters.

LinkedIn has always been the industry standard when it comes to marketing yourself professionally, but the past few years have seen the social network’s importance and reach increase dramatically. TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn has roughly 187 million unique visitors per month, and that number looks like it’ll continue to grow.

In addition, LinkedIn has ramped up its efforts to become a content platform. In the past three years LinkedIn has acquired Slideshare, Pulse and Newsle; all of which hint at a continuing push towards content distribution.

Instead of just maintaining your profile and company page and being active in LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn is now encouraging brands and individuals to leverage its robust, new publishing capabilities. It is clear that LinkedIn sees itself as a vital part of the future of content marketing.

Building out your LinkedIn presence can seem intimidating. There are so many options now that the thought of exploiting them all can overwhelm even the savviest marketers.

Keeping this problem in mind, I set out to track down the most influential and accomplished LinkedIn experts and ask them to weigh in on their recommendations for making the most of your LinkedIn Marketing.

Viveka von Rosen: Leverage LinkedIn’s CRM

Viveka von Rosen is a prominent LinkedIn expert and author of the book LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day. Her recommendation not only highlights some interesting, often overlooked LinkedIn features, but also shows how they can be used to strengthen your networking connections.

Viveka notes that “LinkedIn is about building relationships, and one of the best ways of building relationships is to show your top prospects that you were listening to them.” With this in mind, she points out that LinkedIn actually provides users with fairly robust CRM tools.

She recommends leveraging these tools in five steps:

1. Research your prospect or client (or better yet, have a conversation with them – maybe at a conference or trade show?)

2. Make your notes about the person on their LinkedIn profile. (Click on the star icon to “unfold” LinkedIn’s CRM feature.)

3. Set a reminder to follow up with your prospect.

4. Find an article of your own or search Pulse to find content you think they might be interested in.

5. You can also tag your prospects, segmenting your network in a way that makes sense to you, and that will allow you to follow up with them in smaller groups.

Brian Murray: Be Active, Get Noticed

Brian Murray is the director of talent and culture at the prominent New York-based Digital agency Likeable. Although Brian’s profession is technically HR, he is careful to note: “My audience is NOT HR professionals. It is people with agency experience who love or have a focus on social.”

This is already a powerful lesson. The first step to connecting with your audience is identifying who you are aiming to target. Once you know who you want to notice you, Brian outlines the next step: “I share relevant content that causes them to continue to see me and recognize my name. When I reach out they are a lot more likely to respond than a cold email from somebody who doesn’t regularly use the platforms.”

We tend to misunderstand why it is that we trust certain people online or give them a certain degree of credibility. Brian nails it on the head with this insight. Oftentimes it’s not the amount of followers you have, it’s how often you show up on people’s radar. Perhaps the best piece of advice Brian gives derives from an analogy to sales:

Similar to sales, the time you need to make a sale is not the first time you call or email them. They need to trust you. They need to see you.

Going further, Brian believes that the only thing people like more than seeing someone tweeting or sharing things they love is when you engage with that audience and provide personal interaction. This actually speaks a lot to another piece of advice I got from our next expert.

Stephanie Sammons: The “10 in 10″ Rule

Stephanie Sammons is a renowned LinkedIn expert, named a Top 30 Marketing Thought Leader and a Top 25 Social Media Expert by LinkedIn, who coaches professionals on how to maximize their social presence. Her recommendation for marketers and business owners who hope to build their presence is to adopt what she refers to as the “10 in 10” rule.

“While others are pumping out content and status updates to their entire network” Stephanie instead encourages professionals to “go one-to-one with 10 of your connections 10 minutes a day.”

If you spend 10 minutes a day engaging personally with 10 of your valued LinkedIn contacts, you will grow your influence.

The first step in her process is to identify your MVC’s (Most Valuable Connections) LinkedIn. “These may be prospects, clients, influencers, or advocates for your business. Next, study their profiles and learn more about who they are, what they do, and who they help.”

She continues by noting that “once you are armed with greater intelligence about your MVC’s, strive for a one-to-one engagement with at least 10 of these individuals per day. One-to-one engagement can be in the form of a personalized, private LinkedIn message, a public comment or conversation, a or even an @mention.”

The reasoning goes that a personal, intimate connection with a smaller number of followers can be much more beneficial than an attempt to please everyone. This appears straightforward, but it seems that so few actually spend the emotional energy necessary to foster these connections.

Stephanie offers the assurance that although this consistent connection is hard to maintain, it will be well worth it in the long-run and ultimately lead to social media success.

Lewis Howes: Leverage LinkedIn Pulse

While there is no denying the effectiveness of a more personal approach, LinkedIn has recently become more than a networking tool. The past few years have seen Linked grow from a job-hunting, and resume site into a publishing empire. So how can marketers or professionals leverage this increasingly important aspect of LinkedIn?

Lewis Howes is a LinkedIn expert who hosts the School of Greatness podcast and he recommends leveraging the new LinkedIn Pulse platform by consistently creating engaging content on your profile. Howes points out that until recently the publishing platform was only reserved for select influencers. However things have changed recently and this presents a big opportunity for marketers to earn the attention of the right professional audience on LinkedIn:

With Pulse open to everyone (not just influencers), it’s a massive opportunity to expand your reach.

This is not just a hunch either. Howes shared that he’s “seen a big bump in traffic and leads from this alone” and assured me that this would be the most effective way of reaching a larger and more targeted audience on LinkedIn in the coming year.

Looking at the current trend of LinkedIn’s updates and acquisitions, Howes’ prediction feels spot on. LinkedIn has already gotten hundreds of millions of users accustomed to networking on the site, and now they hope to build that same familiarity with consuming and creating content. The ability to get in on the ground floor of this kind of change is too good for marketers to pass up and should not be ignored.

Alex Pirouz: Have A Strategic Plan in Place

The previous advice has all concerned committing to continuous and sustained interactions with your professional network, but sticking to so many initiatives at once is difficult. Alex Pirouz, a serial entrepreneur who founded Linkfluencer.com, offers a bit of sobering yet crucial advice.

His advice is dead simple, but so often overlooked. “My top tip to anyone looking to use LinkedIn as an effective marketing tool is to first create a clear plan on what they’re looking to achieve from the platform.” Drafting a plan requires: “looking over [your] marketing objectives over the next 6-12 months, identifying the target market [you] would need to connect with in order to achieve those objectives and then building a LinkedIn profile that resonates with this audience.” Just like you would plan your editorial calendar, you should plan your LinkedIn posts.

Not having a plan is the number one reason businesses aren’t using LinkedIn to it’s full potential.

Alex told me that “over the past 12 months we’ve trained over 8000 businesses on how to leverage LinkedIn to grow their business and over 90% of those we speak with don’t have a plan or clear strategy.” He quipped that Ben Franklin said it best, “People don’t plan to fail they fail to plan.”

Bert Verdonck: Earn Greater Visibility with Slideshare

Bert Verdonck is the founder of the pioneering social agency ReallyConnect and a LinkedIn expert in his own right. According to him “one of the most underutilized strategies on LinkedIn today is the use of rich media and SlideShare in particular.”

Most people have no idea of the impact SlideShare can have on their LinkedIn marketing.

Besides being, as Bert refers to it, the “YouTube for Powerpoint,” he told me that “Slideshare links index brilliantly well, often ranking higher than LinkedIn or Facebook.” As if this was not reason enough to embrace the platform, LinkedIn purchased Slideshare in 2013 and has since offered substantial integration capabilities.

He notes that, “Of course, there are some SEO experts who let you pay a ton of money to artificially increase your search results, but SlideShare is for free and beats a lot of other strategies easily and in a natural way.”

His logic here is simple, but speaks to an understanding of the way search visibility works. Slideshare offers “a lot of quality content and Google loves great content, resulting in higher natural rankings. People will find you more easily for your topics.”

In other words, Slideshare helps your profile become more visible not only by putting you higher in search rankings in the search engines and LinkedIn, but by providing engaging content your potential audience wants to see when they do reach your profile. Talk about a win-win scenario.

Neal Schaffer: Embrace Long-Form Publishing

Neal Schaffer is the author of the excellent LinkedIn book Maximize Your Social as well as a social media coach, consultant and trainer. His recommendation for professionals looking to maximize their LinkedIn presence is to take advantage of long-form publishing.

Neal points out that “LinkedIn opened up their blogging platform to all users in 2014, but very few have taken advantage of being a part of the LinkedIn publishing empire.” Sure people have taken to posting some content, but the efforts of many users are scattershot or lack-luster short-form posts. Instead, Neal believes LinkedIn should be treated like a full-fledged syndicated blog.

If you are only blogging on your corporate blog you are missing out on the opportunity to get your content in front of eager eyes on LinkedIn.

This is a wasted opportunity because “when you blog on LinkedIn, your content is seen not only by your connections but also by others who are consuming news on LinkedIn Pulse.” Neal mentions that he has seen great long-form content by users that “received more views than their number of connections, and some that have literally received hundreds of thousands of views.”

As LinkedIn positions itself as a content platform, the benefits of embracing a content-centric strategy will become more and more pronounced. Stay one step ahead of the curve by creating engaging, rich, long-form content.

John Rampton is a social media expert and columnist for publications such asForbes, Entrepreneur and Inc. The advice he gave was something that frustrated him because it is so easy, yet so many people miss it. “I can never understand why people go to networking events, hand me their business card, and they don’t have their LinkedIn profile on there.”

He continued, “They have other social networks on there, but LinkedIn is THE professional networking site. When I want to size you up professionally, that’s where I go.” While it’s certainly easy enough to find someone on LinkedIn, John is right that the additional step to make people go through is an unnecessary barrier between connecting.

Don’t be shy about calling out your LinkedIn profile. Put it on your email, business card, etc… – anything with your name on it, your profile should be there too.

Another place he feels people miss calling out their profile is in their email signature. “Email is the same thing, your professional email can just as easily be an additional touch point or place to connect.”

Especially for people working in sales, John feels that having a LinkedIn profile link in email is such an easy, effective opportunity to connect that people miss all too often.

“My other recommendations would be leveraging the LinkedIn publishing platform and engaging more frequently, but these efforts are all maximized by having more connections, and calling out your profile is such an easy way to bring that number up.”

How do you describe yourself on LinkedIn? Are you ‘motivated’? ‘Passionate’? How about ‘creative’?

You may truly be all these things, but if you list them on your LinkedIn profile you certainly aren’t original. That’s because for the fifth consecutive year, LinkedIn has analyzed its English-language profiles and released a list of the top 10 overused buzzwords : ‘Motivated,’ ‘passionate’ and, somewhat ironically, ‘creative’ top the list.

Other overused offenders include stock resume adjectives such as ‘driven,’ ‘responsible’ and ‘expert,’ along with jargon-y fillers, including ‘extensive experience’ ‘organizational’ and ‘track record.’

The latest trend in startup names? Regular old human names

If you work in startups, there’s a good chance you know Oscar. And Alfred. Benny, too. And don’t forget Lulu and Clara. These aren’t the prominent Silicon Valley people that techies know by first name (although those exist—think Marissa, Satya, Larry and Sergey, Zuck). Rather, Oscar, Alfred, Benny, Lulu and Clara are companies. The latest trend in startup names is regular old human names.

Oscar is a New York health insurance company with a consumer Web sensibility. Alfred, the Boston firm named after Bruce Wayne’s butler, provides errand-running services like groceries and laundry for a monthly fee. Benny, also in New York, offers freelance workers insurance, accounting and tax services. Lulu—again, of New York—is an app that lets girls anonymously rate guys they know. Clara, based in the Bay Area, provides a virtual service to do things like scheduling meetings.

Startups are choosing human names for a simple reason: to humanize the software they’re selling. Many young tech companies make software that replaces a function once done by a person. We increasingly conduct the business of our lives through the screen of our mobile devices. Many startups believe that in order to win a customer’s trust, they need a human touch.

Jacob Brody, founder of Benny, says he chose the name because he wants his company to be seen as a trustworthy helper, not a faceless corporation. “We wanted to create software with soul,” he says. “Benny has your back. He’s your buddy and dependable.”

Five examples does not make this a full-fledged trend, at least not yet. Still, startup naming is a faddish endeavor. You can often tell what era a startup comes from based on its name.

Is the company’s name a kooky word with too many vowels, such as Google GOOG or Yahoo YHOO? It was probably founded in the Web 1.0 era of the mid-to-late 1990s.

Is the name in question a kooky word with not enough vowels, like Flickr, Tumblr, or Twttr, the original name for Twitter? It’s from the Web 2.0 era of the mid-2000s.

Is it two words jammed together with a capitalized letter in the middle—so-called camel case—such as NetSuite N, LinkedIn LNKD, YouTube, or BuzzFeed? Who knows. That style trend, a blight to copy editors everywhere, will simply not die.

Does the company’s name end in a cutesy suffix like Chirpify, Spotify, Ghostery, Findery, Bitly, Contently, Artsy, or Etsy? It was probably born in the last eight years, as evidenced by this chart. Many companies in this category took advantage of readily available domain names from Syria or Libya, ending in .sy and .ly, respectively.

In fact, choosing a startup name used to be all about scoring the domain name. That has become less important with the rise of mobile, where users find apps in by searching an app store. If a URL is too expensive, a startup can add a word like “app,” “get” or “use” to its name. Foursquare’s Swarm uses SwarmApp.com; Confide uses GetConfide.com. Some apps have simple one-word names but use a foreign country’s URL suffix, like Secret, which uses Secret.ly, Vine, which uses Vine.co, or Whisper, which uses Whisper.sh.

5 quick ways to shine on social media

With everyone from your boss to your competitors and everyone in between checking your LinkedIn profile, Twitter feed and Facebook page on a constant basis, there is a lot of pressure to self-promote. Yet despite the expectation to blog, tweet and ‘like’ as much as you can, who has the time to sit on social media all day? At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit, about 100 rising women leaders tackled this very question.

1. Be passionate or lie
It needs to come across immediately that you are interested and engaged in the work you are doing, says Williams from LinkedIn. If you don’t convey a true passion for your job and what you are doing on a daily basis, then no one is going to want to engage with you on social media in the first place. What if you’re not passionate about work? Your options are simple, says Williams: Find a new job or lie about why you’re passionate.

2. Pick your points
You can’t be an expert at everything. At the same time, you don’t have the time to tweet, blog and post about a myriad of topics on a daily basis. A better strategy is to hone in of what is truly important to you, says Barker of Pramana Collective. Also, all of your “talking points” don’t necessarily have to be about work. In fact, it’s good to show your human side by showcasing your hobbies and interests outside of the office. Ask yourself what your big focus areas are and create a social identity around them.

3. Speak in first person
One of Williams’ biggest LinkedIn pet peeves is when people write their profiles in the third person. It sounds so impersonal and like you are farming out your writing to someone who works for you, she said. Changing your summary on LinkedIn to the first person makes you sound more human and tells readers that you are connected to your work.

4. Tell a story
People love telling and hearing stories, says Barker. That’s just a fact of life. Take that notion and apply it to what you do on social media. A blog post is best when its filled with real life anecdotes. The best tweets are those that give context as opposed to just straight links and headlines.

5. ‘Beat your chest’
This one is particularly difficult for women, says Barker, but it’s extremely important to own and showcase your accomplishments to their full extent when thinking about an identity online. Women tend to downplay their leadership on a specific initiative or project. “Beat your chest,” says Barker, because you’re the only one who really knows the true extent of your power or authority in a particular field.

Are your job ads putting candidates to sleep?

Dear Annie: I’ve been put in charge of hiring a few new people for our department, which does social media marketing, and I’m trying to come up with a way to describe the talent and experience we’re looking for. This is a pretty new area of the company, so there aren’t any old job descriptions around here that I could use as a template, and the ones I’ve been looking at online are mostly so boring. Is it crazy to think that, since we’re looking for dynamic, imaginative people to do interesting, creative work, the job description should be interesting and creative too? Do you or your readers have any suggestions? — Just Janet

Dear J.J.: Not crazy at all. “Job descriptions are usually just an item on a hiring manager’s checklist, so they end up as a dry list of qualifications,” explains Brendan Browne, director of recruiting at LinkedIn. That’s a wasted opportunity. “Candidates in demand now have a choice of jobs, so how are you going to stand out?” he says. “The right description is often your first, and best, chance to catch the eye of the right talent.”

Browne has had some experience with this. When he started at LinkedIn in 2010, the social media site had about 500 employees. It now has over 6,000, in 30 cities worldwide. Here are a few of LinkedIn’s tips for writing a job ad that will wow the people you want to attract:

Use recognizable titles. “Creative” titles — like Office Ninja for administrative assistant, or Brand Champion when you mean social media specialist — aren’t search-friendly, and will likely put off anyone who doesn’t know what they mean.

Keep the tone candid and conversational. Lots of ads feature a heading like “Job Overview,” followed by two or three paragraphs of jargon. Yawn. Instead, Browne recommends getting quickly to the point, with “Why Join Us?” followed by two or three sentences that answer the question.

Likewise, long lists of “Job Requirements” in some ads often include a veiled reference to a drawback of the job, buried in verbiage. That’s a mistake. “It’s essential that the ad reflect the reality,” Browne notes. “If there is something that makes this role especially tough or challenging, say it as if you were speaking to the person. Put in a ‘Worst Part of the Job’ sub-head.”

LinkedIn, for instance, is growing so fast that a few basic processes aren’t fully developed yet and have to be improvised on the fly. If something like that is true in your shop too, briefly say so. “Be authentic about the job,” says Browne. “You want no surprises for new hires later.”

Promote your company’s brand. When LinkedIn surveyed 18,000 employees across various industries on what would lure them to a new job, 56% said an employer’s job-market brand was a big influence. “People want to love where they work, so why someone would love working with you has got to come screaming through,” Browne says. It helps to replace a typically dull list of details about the company’s history with two or three sentences explaining why your business is exciting now.

Avoid buzzwords. Instead of eye-glazing boilerplate like “Fits well with our culture and the values consistent in our organization,” offer information about the actual culture at your company — maybe by mentioning why you like coming to work in the morning.

Emphasize the impact of the job. Lots of job ads contain vague descriptions like “Lead the business and drive change to meet performance goals.” Say what? “Those phrases don’t mean anything to anyone,” notes Browne. “Try spelling out specifically why the role matters, what they’ll be doing, and what they’ll learn.” LinkedIn’s survey of passive job candidates showed that people who already have jobs are most likely to move if a new job offers a candidate the chance to make their own distinctive mark. If that’s the case with the job openings you’re trying to fill, make it clear.

Be concise. The LinkedIn talent study showed there’s a 30% chance your ideal candidate will read your job description on a mobile device, where the smaller screen means each word has to count. You could also consider adding another dimension to the text by embedding a video that shows, say, some of your team’s work, or features you talking about the team, the company, and the job.

In a way, the fact that there aren’t any old job descriptions around for you to use is an advantage, because it means you get to start fresh. For most hiring managers, “it takes a shift in mindset” to get away from the same old snooze-inducing job descriptions, says Browne. “But, in the current tight market for talent, it’s worth the effort to differentiate your company from the crowd.”